quiescence failed to hide the tips of two rather prominent white teeth
pressed down on the lower lip. I don't say there was anything unmanly
about Jevons's figure (he wasn't noticeably undersized), or about his
mouth and jaw. I knew a great General with a mouth and jaw like that, and
he was one of the handsomest figures in the Service. I'm not hinting at
anything like effeminacy in Jevons, only at a certain oddity that really
saved him. If he'd been handsome he'd have been dreadful. His flush, his
decorative eyes, his dark eyebrows and eyelashes, his sleek, light brown
hair, would have made him vulgar. As it was, his queerness gave them a
sort of point.

I dwell on these physical details because, afterwards, I found myself
continually looking at him as if to see where his charm lay. To see, I
suppose, what _she_ saw in him.

If anybody had asked me that night what I saw in him myself beyond an
ordinary little journalist "on the make," I don't suppose I could have
told them. But there's no doubt that I felt his charm, or that night
would have been the end instead of the beginning.

We sat in the restaurant when he had done telling me about himself; I
remember we sat quite a long time discussing an English writer--our
contemporary--whom I rather considered I had discovered. In those days I
used to apply him as an infallible test. Jevons had read every word of
him; it was he, in fact, who brought him into the conversation. He
confessed afterwards that he had done it on purpose. He had been testing
_me_.

Even so our acquaintance might have lapsed but for the thing that
happened when the waiter came up with the bill. My share of it was three